Conversion and Community Among Iu Mien Refugee Immigrants in the United States

Chapter 9 Conversion and Community among Iu Mien Refugee Immigrants in the United States Hjorleifur Jonsson The Iu Mien (Mien, Yao) have a long history in southern China, though anthropological work on their social forms, religious practices, and the like has primarily drawn on research conducted in Thailand and Laos, and then among refugee immigrants in the United States (Habarad 1987; MacDonald 1997). Among the Iu Mien in Thailand and in the United States, there are some deep divides between Christian and non-Christian communities. But the issue of internal factions is more complex, where, for instance, Mien Christians in Thailand are divided by script, with one faction using the Thai alphabet and the other Romanization. It is equally impor- tant to insist that religious difference does not inevitably preclude shared interest or collaboration. There are, for instance, some families where one of the members maintains links to ancestor spirits while the other is Christian. My chapter attempts to situate Christian conversions among US Iu Mien within a longer history of religious dynamics and shifts, and as one of several means through which people have arrived at forms of community. The historical part of my case emphasizes diversity and specificity. One aspect of this is the difference between chiefs and commoners prior to the 1950s, and the multiple impact of the war in Laos during 1958–1975. Religious orientations and shifts are shaped in specific contexts, as unevenly situated people respond to the conditions of their lives—cultural practices and patterns are not transmitted in any stable way but are instead continually being con- structed and reconstructed (Sperber 2005). I draw attention to some of the contexts where differentially situated Iu Mien have arrived 236 HJORLEIFUR JONSSON at particular configurations of religion, community, and identity. My aim is in part to counter the expectation of religious or cultural uniformity or stability prior to the Iu Mien becoming refugees or Christians. The range of Iu Mien religious orientations over the last century and a half suggests various gradations of conversion. Exploring this diversity, I suggest that Mien religious practice has never been singular. Christianity currently offers one of many strategies of build- ing community, maintaining transnational relations, and expressing collective identity. Suspending the expectation of a singular Mien religion undoes the antagonistic binary of tradition/ancestor worship and modernity/Christianity. With that, the questions shift to social and personal orientations and expectations in their particular historical settings. The focus on diversity, specificity, and issues of community-formation and leadership brings out parallels among divergent religious orientations that the expectation of contrast and antagonism makes unthinkable. My concern is with religious dynamics among the Iu Mien from the late nineteenth century and until 2011, which spatially per- tains to southern China, the northern parts of Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, and to the West Coast of the United States, where Iu Mien people settled as refugee immigrants after 1975. The social framework for Iu Mien religious activity has ranged from farming to migration, warfare, refugee camps, and finally urban areas of the United States. At all times, Iu Mien peoples have engaged with religious ideas in multicultural and translocal (including international) settings. Religion has always been an engagement across difference: social, spiritual, political, and linguistic. Recent conversions to Christianity are a manifestation of how people’s identities and practices have taken shape in particular circumstances that are of a historical moment and at the same time lend shape to people’s historical being. Iu Mien have often crossed ethnic and religious lines for particular purposes, and their religious practices have been formed in historical context. War, farming, and migration are three different modes of being, and each privileges particular religious foci. Since 2005, I have come to know Iu Mien people as refugee immigrants from Laos in the United States. While their religious practices had been similar to what I knew from Thailand (intermittently since 1990), it was clear that the context of the Second Indochina War in Laos (1962–1975) had a significant influence on how people engaged with the world of spirits. For one, the war played up a focus on invulnerability and military IU MIEN REFUGEE IMMIGRANTS 237 prowess that were for the most part beyond the reach of ancestor spirits. People relied on links to soldier spirits ( m’geh mienv, m’geh paeng, mborqv-jaax mienv ) and took increasingly to wearing Buddhist amu- lets, and they learned many ideas from lowland Tai (Lao, Tai Dam, Tai Lue, and so on) Buddhists. During an episode of witchcraft fears, Iu Mien people asked for advice across ethnic and linguistic boundaries regarding the appropriate reaction. Whatever structure or pattern there has been to religious activity should be viewed as particular outcomes of actions and interactions in particular contexts, which need to be situated (Latour 2005). Over time, interactions can produce simi- larities and correspondences that are obscured if the descriptive and analytical premise insists on the ethnic group as the unit of ideas and action. My resistance to the ethnicist framework echoes recent areal (“regional”) approaches to Southeast Asia, particu- larly those of anthropologist Richard O’Connor (1995, 2000) and linguist N. J. Enfield (2003, 2005); “seeing states and peoples as regional constructions is necessary to escaping nationalist histories and their tautologies of race, culture, and ethnicity” (O’Connor 2000: 431). Currently, all forms of Iu Mien religious practice have an international dimension. A translation of the Bible involved westerners as well as Mien people in Thailand, France, and the United States. A recent temple to King Pan, the ultimate Mien ancestor, involves various exchanges with China. Ancestor worship also serves to cre- ate transnational networks. The most accomplished spirit medium among the Mien in the United States has made annual visits to the Mien who settled in France after the war, where he takes care of various rituals and maintains kinship connections. These networks are not just religious; they involve languages, various forms of media, international travel, economic transactions, and many forms of communication (telephones, internet, print, video, audio cassettes, and different writing systems). And the Mien language itself is not a singular reference: historically the Iu Mien have a distinct vernacular language, a separate prose language, and also a ritual language (see Purnell 1991, 2012). Christian missionaries used the everyday language for their work and wrote hymns in that language. Tracing the associations and networks that involve recent religious dynamics among the Iu Mien does not indicate that religion is a distinct or bounded field; it intersects in innumerable ways with other dimensions of social life, worldview, exchanges, and interactions across difference and different domains. 238 HJORLEIFUR JONSSON Historical Background on Religious Orientation and Social Frameworks Anthropologists who studied Thailand’s Iu Mien in the 1960s and 1970s vary in their characterizations; Douglas Miles (1974) stresses ancestor worship and Jacques Lemoine (1982, 1983) Daoism, while Peter Kandre (1967) and Yoshiro Shiratori (1978) insist that the two are usually combined. I emphasize situating religious practice in social life. People must establish and maintain contracts with particular spirits. A couple would usually initiate a contract with patrilin- eal ancestors on forming a household, and the subsequent offerings were meant to ensure the flow of soul-stuff that made them prosper in farming and in other aspects of life. At feasts that follow rituals, people exchange blessings, and only those with their own relations with ancestors can channel blessings. People who could not afford a proper wedding (bride price, pigs, and so on) might elope. Without a household and sufficient means, people cannot establish and maintain the relations with ancestor spirits that give access to soul-stuff and blessings. A village founder or leader establishes a relationship with a village owner spirit, for the collective well-being of his constituents. In the cases I know of, this was usually the spirit of the best-known or most powerful lowland leader of a nearby polity. Multi-village lead- ers might cement their position with ritual contracts to royal spirits, which were usually matched with a relationship to a valley lord who would confer a title (phaya ) and establish trade relations. I know of this reality from the history of the Mien who settled in the kingdom of Nan (later a province of Thailand), and what I later learned from the Iu Mien who settled in northern Laos is quite similar (Jonsson 2005, 2009). The two groups are derived from the same mass migration from Guangdong and Guangxi in southern China, initially to northern Vietnam (Muang Lai), then Yunnan (Muang La), and later to Laos (Muang Sing, Nam Tha) and Thailand (Muang Nan)—it spans roughly the 1860s to 1880s. The migration was in part a field for establishing leadership among the Mien, and many men came into royal titles as they settled near any one of the many kingdoms that lasted until about 1900. Subsequent colonial and national governments were generally

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